Urban renewal with a conservative flair

Oklahoma’s schools, faced with a budget crunch, are increasingly going to four-day weeks. The starting salary for teachers hasn’t been raised in 10 years. The prisons are so overcrowded, they have asked for an additional $1 billion.

The state is facing an estimated $650 million budget deficit – and it’s likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, because in this conservative state few want to raise taxes (and they can’t, without three-quarters of the legislature).

In short, there’s a big mess at the state capitol in Oklahoma City.

Across town, however, it’s a different story: The city has turned a neighborhood of abandoned warehouses into a chic shopping and dining area, built a grand new downtown library, erected a sports arena, and wooed its very own NBA team. Soon, it will break ground on a new convention center.

Remarkably, it hasn’t taken out a single loan to do any of this. No, this conservative city – the largest in the nation to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 – gave itself a facelift by bucking right-wing orthodoxy and raising sales taxes.

Now, the man who presided over much of the revitalization – four-term Republican Mayor Mick Cornett – is running for governor, and hoping to apply some of the same principles that worked at the city level to the state as a whole.

'I was skeptical'A land rushServing wealthy interests over othersInflux of entrepreneurs